Why am I laughing?

If this music is the expression of eternal truth in the face of an ugly civilization, then it will seem ugly, unbearable.

Forget everything you know, feel or care about. Accept nothing but the music. Be eternally patient and let it convince you. This beauty in darkness is not apparent, it must be found. Like all revelations, you laugh when it hits, because it was already there and the change had to occur in you.

If you are content to stay away crow, if you do not desire to understand the music itself, then I suggest at least a read of the Philosophy of Metal section. Without the actual experience, the value of those words is less, but it is well stated and comprehensive. Let that be your key to unlocking us if your ears can't take the abuse. Metal is the ode written to a tsunami moments before it hits you. Awe, glory, majesty. Embrace your distaste to lose it.

I have decided, after due consideration, to view metalheads as people who - through no fault of their own - took a wrong evolutionary turn, somewhere, and are now living in a parallel universe. This other universe is as real, to them, as the one they abandoned, albeit without knowing that they left. And so it is good that forums such as this, exist for them, lest they become isolated and alone.

Art, back in the original universe, is a celebration of life, beauty, and the urge to add to it. To contribute something. Whereas, in the other parallel universes that the original one gave rise to, art has come to mean many things, often very far removed from the original concept.

Metal seems to be about death, as opposed to life. Do I understand this correctly?

Life is about death. It isn't the metalheads who are in the alternate universe. At some point human development took an ugly turn called modernity. Now lies are truth and depravity is honour. Back to "uglier" times, that's metal. We embrace not just the apparently pleasant but the totality, and love every bit of it. Metal is definitely a celebration of life, but it exists in a world that hates life so it must brutally shock it into realization. I would say you got it wrong, yeah. Others may disagree.

Then again this isn't something you can just get right intellectually, dispassionately. Without the experience, these words are mere ramblings. But even so, is death not beautiful?

Edit: For an example, metal is the third panel of Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights. Ugly figures cavort and torture the blind with their own amusements. Is this a celebration of life? It is, in lesson form.

I do not judge this, and to have any discourse upon the subject, this should be understood. I am a crow, and as you may know, in native cultures, across all times and in all places, crows have always been messengers between the living and the dead. Able to inhabit both realms at once.

You fellas are obsessed with death and deathly things, which is fine by me. But I am not. While I live, I am obsessed with life. But being a crow, I have beaten life to death, and having tasted death, am content to leave it in its rightful place: the realm of all those who no longer live.

I find myself perfectly, and inevitably, well-placed, on this unlikely forum, since it is so intimately connected with death. While carrying messages received from here, back to the realm of the living, and vice-versa.

I don't think metal is ugly. Metal finds beauty in ugly stuff. War is beautiful. Death of idiots is beautiful. Even disease is beautiful if you look at it with an appreciation for the virus. It's not as simple as "metal is ugly," that's a simplification. Metal is about all the stuff we fear includling death and horror and it finds meaning in all of them.

Simplification is the special talent of crows. What you find beautiful is ugly to those you see as inferior. Those you see as inferior find you ugly. You admit to fearing what you worship? A mirrored reflection of concepts like Christianity, then.

I don't think that is what was meant to be communicated there. The "we" is humanity in general. Humanity fears death, fears adversity and rejects them; yet it is these contrasts that give life its vital flavour. Metal accepts them and so that fear is lost, or rather transmuted into meaning. The fear of fear is lost. There definitely is an element of the morbid here, a desire to stare into the abyss, but lovingly so. In any case, anything worthy of worship is worthy of being feared. Nothing else is.

Metal is not for everyone, but that's not a problem with metal, it's a problem with everyone

It is good that you describe what you believe in. Or what you believe. Each refinement makes a stronger case, or reveals fallacy for what it is. I did this, unwillingly, with my despising of leftism. I had to, in order to focus my necessary defense against it.

Falot is right, the we is everyone. I think metal is really beautiful. You can't run away from what's scary in life, or the beauty you find is fake. Metal to me is like a dose of reality while everybody else is listening to "baby rub your booty on my face" and thinking vapid thoughts.

Not everybody else. Neither I, nor my wife, listen to music at all. For some very compelling reasons. On the rare occasions that we do, in very small doses, it is music that inspires, or reminds us of vanished glory. We're old, see?